The New Dad: A Portrait of Today's Father

Over the last six years, the Boston College Center for Work & Family (BCCWF) has completed a series of research studies on the changing face of fatherhood in America. In 2009, we recognized that the lack of high-quality, in-depth research on fathers had led to many misconceptions, including:

Inaccurate portrayals of fathers in the media

Outdated workplace assumptions about the caregiving roles that fathers play

Employer work-family programs targeted, explicitly or implicitly, at women, making men reluctant to take advantage of these offerings

Increased work-family conflict for fathers that is not widely recognized or understood

Perhaps the most troubling problem is that fathers' voices have often been absent from, or perhaps even seen as irrelevant to, work-family conversations. In an effort to address this, we began our journey with a relatively small sample, qualitative study of fathers of very young children to better understand their experiences. We coined the title "The New Dad" for what became our research series and have published a report each year exploring differing perspective of the role dads play today at work and in the home.